The practice behaviours of expert League of Legends players: An exploratory study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51224/SRXIV.479Keywords:
Esports, Competitive video gaming, Ranked, SkilledAbstract
Esports has garnered substantial academic interest in the last decade as an expertise domain and professional pursuit; however, scientific investigations exploring players' practice behaviours in different esports genres and games are still scarce. Therefore, the current exploratory study aimed to address this knowledge gap. We sourced data from Riot Game's Application Programming Interface. The sample included randomly selected League of Legends players (n = 913) from four tiers (i.e. Challenger, Grandmaster, Master, and Emerald I) and eight servers (relatively large = North America, Korea, Europe West, and Vietnam; relatively small = Brazil, Japan, Russia, and Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia). We extracted the time and date of players' last 100 matches, which we used to derive additional practice behaviour metrics. Overall, Challenger players had more matches per day, less variability in their total hours, went the fewest days without a match, and had the greatest number of matches in three- and seven-day practice blocks than other tiers. Servers with larger player pools tended to have more daily practice than comparatively smaller servers. We devised several hypotheses, including: (1) the volume of solo/due ranked practice is associated with expertise, (2) more effective stress-coping strategies explain the lower variability in daily practice hours between tiers, (3) there is an interrelationship between player pool size, competitiveness, and practice behaviours, and (4) there are distinct patterns of practice that promote sustained participation and prolonged disengagement. Future research using confirmatory methods should test our hypotheses to improve our understanding of esports practice behaviours.
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References
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Copyright (c) 2024 Kyle Bennett, Dylan Poulus, Andrew Novak (Author)
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